GRAUBY GRAUBY | Sharing the process
Hello everyone, I came here to share a bit of the development process of the game Grauby Grauby, made during the Ludum Dare 43, event that took 72 hours. Our team had 3 days to research, generate ideas, evaluate them to select one, prototype, validate it and finally start the development cycle (art, music, design, architecture and functionalities).
The result was a casual game where the player helps the Slime GRAUBY to progress in his dungeon, moving away from his enemies. For this he needs to sacrifice his body mass to move around the walls. The control of the game is simple, can be played with a mouse or with the touchpad just by dragging and releasing to launch GRAUBY forward.

You can download the executable (Win or Mac) or play on your browser.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/grauby-grauby
OUR TEAM
Danilo| Designer: Responsible for generating various game mechanics, planning and testing the level, and keep the team always on the same page throughout the entire process.
Maida & Marconi | Developers: Separated by 4 time zones, they were responsible for the construction of the architecture and logic to give life to our game. Our team used Unity to develop the game.
Filipe | Composer and Sound Designer: Responsible for making the sound effects and the music of the game. In the process of building these assets also encouraged the team to define an ambiance and context for the game.
Tamyres & Clarc | Artists: Always in sync to design the best visual solutions for the game by mixing Clarc's pixel-art skills with Tamyres 3D modeling experience. They used Aseprite, Maya and a little Substance for that.
I (Danilo), Daniel and Filipe were in the same city, which facilitated our communication because we used the same space to work. Although they were in the same country, Clarc and Tamyres were 1 hour apart from us, and Marconi lives in Denmark, which is 4 hours ahead.
PRE-LUDUM
A few days before the gamejam, we already had the team defined and we knew that we would have to face the timezone differences. So we focused on putting together a spreadsheet with the available schedules of each team member and organizing the discord channel to communicate and get more involved as a team
We also defined some steps to be completed each day; to decide on an idea by Friday, to have the functional core on Saturday ... Even though it is not so accurate in practice, it helps us know how late we are along the jam to be attentive in the moments of simplifying the scope or removing some functionality.

Part of the sheet with our team schedules throughout different time-zones.
GETTING STARTED
The theme was our greatest difficulty (Sacrifices must be made). We spent a few hours listing ideas in a worksheet: each member would pitch their own ideas, as well as give feedback on other people's ideas.
We were in the middle of the night (3:00 a.m.) and the process of ideation was so difficult that we preferred to go to sleep to renew our ideas and make the decision more objective and less obvious (we saw many of the ideas we had had during Ludum's early hours on the main page).
Among the ideas that we like the most; (1) the player controls a skeleton running away from dogs, needing to throw pieces of their body to gain distance (I loved this!). (2) player needs to protect a child by fleeing monsters in a maze, to keep the enemies away the protagonist would need to use his own blood. (3) Slime who sacrifices his mass to launch forward and reach his goal.

Sketchs of the idea number (3), chosen to be our game
We ended up choosing the idea that the whole team felt the desire to work with and that had a possible scope (given the time). We still had most of Saturday to plan together the next days of work. At last we were ready to begin development; with the first sketches we could already see where our project could go, with different layout layouts that allowed different game experiences and various scenery hazards… There were lots of ideas for a short time, so we needed to plan the next steps objectively.
PLANNING AND CHECKPOINTS
With the details of the idea at hand, it was possible to plan which features were essential for core-gameplay: control of the slime (input of drag and drop), basic obstacles (mobile and hazards), hp and respawn. With these features listed and prioritized along with the secondary / auxiliary mechanics, we can organize what would be the focus of each day's work. For the first day, our goal was to deliver all of the core mechanics, with placeholder art or as much as we could integrate in time.
During development, due to the difference of time zone, the programming team was always attentive to the division of tasks between core-gameplay, secondary mechanics and integration of art and sound, avoiding wasted time solving merge conflicts.

Prototype made with blocks to validate the game idea
One of the biggest challenges of a gamejam is the limited time the team has to develop a cohesive game where the contribution of all areas makes sense among each other to create value and FUN to the gameplay. Much of the activity is done in parallel, while art and sound are being sketched and shaped, new ideas of mechanics are emerging, and the old ones (already listed and being implemented) need adjustments to make more sense. You need to pay attention to what is being done by each team member, knowing that each new task can generate an activity for another person. It helps a lot to have a team member allocated to manage and prioritize activities among the team.
The visual of the game began to take shape quickly. Although it was a novelty for the whole team, mixing 3d models with texture in pixel-art was already something we intend to do because of the isolated skills of our art team. The synchrony between the team worked very well, they quickly test the aesthetic results by making mockups before uv-mapping the models, texturizing, validating and and integrating the object in Unity.

Some of the character art progress
In order to make the music of the game, it took an effort of the whole team to define an atmosphere that made sense with the game and the theme of the jam, discussing and building a thematic that enriched our mechanics. Starting from references of melodies and instruments of the dark ages, we were able to create something that would fit not only with the atmosphere but also with the rhythm of the game.
At the end of Sunday (second day) with everything going well for releasing our second build, containing all of our core-gameplay and much of the visual assets (the first build was a prototype of the mechanics), errors at Unity prevented us from generating it. The solution to the lack of a playable build was to record a gameplay video in the Unity editor, in order to sync the team with the current version of the project to continue polishing, adjusting or starting new activities.
THE FINAL DAY
The last day is always the hardest, in our case the fact that all the staff work on Monday got in the way. But we made good use of the time we had to* work on some team feedbacks* that we collected internally with our video and later with the build.
From a design perspective, we had a lot of problems setting up the scene over the first few days, due to inconsistencies in functionality and little knowledge of the tool by the designer. Starting the sketch of level design throughout the project was essential to learning how to improve our tools to make the process flow faster. Since the mechanics could already be tested in Unity alone, it was already enough to plan much of the level on the paper while these adjustments were made to later facilitate the assembly of the whole level in Unity.

Level Design planning before implement on Unity
In the last few hours we had many crucial things being made at the same time: the level design implementation with little time for testing and validation; the validation and integration of sound assets; the review of the checkpoints functionality; and the attempt to add an art asset that was planned over the previous day. Not to mention the description, screenshots and generation of builds to upload to the Ludum Dare website before the timer reaches zero.
We managed to deliver much of what was planned. It was 3 days of effort, but in the end we managed to upload our game to LD43!
FUN ABOVE ALL
Despite the few hours of rest, a lot of time in front of the computer and headaches to solve all the problems that came up during the process, it was worth every second. We had a lot of fun, we were always laughing and playing with each other through discord voicechat or hangout.
We could not deliver everything we had planned, certain things did not go through the necessary adjustment in time, but the process of building and solving problems together taught us a lot. We learned and have a lot of fun together, this is worth more than any game.


















Top: Tonho, Caio, Clarc and Danilo. Bottom: Delio, Diego, Filipe and Renato.















